In general, an anti-reflective film is mounted on a flat-panel display device, such as a plasma display panel (PDP), a liquid crystal display (LCD), and the like, to minimize reflection of light incident from the outside.
Methods for minimizing reflection of light include dispersing fillers, such as inorganic fine particles, in a resin and coating the resin on a substrate film to impart unevenness (i.e. anti-glare (AG) coating method), forming a plurality of layers having different refractive indices on a substrate film to use light interference (i.e. anti-reflection (AR) coating method), or a combination of these methods, and the like.
In the AG coating method, the absolute amount of reflected light is equivalent to that of a general hard coating method, but it is possible to reduce the amount of reflection by increasing the unevenness of the surface of a substrate, thereby decreasing the amount of light entering the eyes of a viewer. However, due to the unevenness of the surface, the sharpness of the screen deteriorates. Therefore, recently, the AR coating method has been increasingly studied.
A commercially available film having a multilayer structure in which a hard coating layer (high-refractive index layer), a low-reflective coating layer, and the like, are laminated on a substrate film may be used in the AR coating method. However, in the method of forming the above-described plurality of layers, the interfacial adhesion between the various layers may be weak, thereby deteriorating the scratch resistance.
In order to improve scratch resistance of the low-refractive layer included in the anti-reflective film, various nanometer-size particles (for example, silica particles, alumina particle, zeolite particles, or the like) may be added. However, in such a case, it is difficult to increase scratch resistance while also decreasing the reflectance of the low-refractive layer, thereby significantly reducing the anti-fouling property of a surface of the low-refractive layer.
Therefore, various studies for decreasing reflectance while also improving anti-fouling property and scratch resistance of a surface have been conducted, but physical properties of the anti-reflective film are not sufficiently improved in spite of these studies.